Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, has announced his resignation from both his executive role and the company board. Stability AI is recognized for its image generation tool named Stable Diffusion, which previously led to various copyright infringement lawsuits and claims of enabling the creation of illicit images.
In the interim, the COO and CTO of the company, Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, have been declared as co-CEOs. This transition was publicly disclosed in a recent company blog post. Mostaque stated that his commitment to the potential of decentralized AI had led him to this decision.
Mostaque is a firm believer in the power of decentralized AI to challenge the current centralized AI models, such as Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5/4, and Anthropic’s Claude. He asserts that decentralized AI will provide the changes essential for advancement. “You’re not going to beat centralized AI with more centralized AI,” Mostaque said, pushing for a more transparent and distributed approach to AI governance.
Mostaque praised the company’s achievements under his leadership, like attracting hundreds of millions of downloads and crafting the best models. In spite of these accomplishments, however, he felt the need to ensure that AI remains open and decentralized, hence his decision to resign.
He stated, “The concentration of power in AI is bad for us all. I decided to step down to fix this at Stability & elsewhere.” Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, recently voiced a similar sentiment calling for sovereign AI. Many researchers, like Meta’s Yann LeCun, share the same opinion and see open-source AI as a means of diffusing power.
The resignation of Mostaque, holder of the majority of Stability AI shares, follows controversial times for the company. Apart from controversies surrounding its tool Stable Diffusion, the company’s financial health has also been a subject of debate. It was reported by Bloomberg in October 2023 that the company’s monthly expenditure was around $8 million, and its attempts to secure $4 billion valuation for new funding didn’t succeed.
Another notable controversy was the lawsuit from co-founder Cyrus Hodes accusing Mostaque of fraudulent behavior, along with multiple copyright lawsuits from Getty Images and several artists. Such controversies have frequently placed the company’s operations under scrutiny.
